What about Motivation and School Choice? Look at the Research

In a study published in the National Bureau of Economic Research, researchers found a 21-percent decline in truancy rates for males entering high school. 

The Yale Daily News sat down with one of the coauthors, Seth Zimmerman, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Economics.  Here’s what Zimmerman said on the research:

Q What’s the essence of school choice?

A School choice is when students have the option to attend schools other than those in their local school zones. In the district we studied, there is a pretty comprehensive district-wide choice program where students can choose from a variety of public magnet schools or charter schools. Each year there is a lottery in the spring where students will submit a ranked list of the schools they want to attend. After the district conducts the lottery the students find out where they are going to go the next year.

Q Do you think that the motivation to go to a choice school would in itself have an effect on lowered truancy rates and improved test scores?

A I think that in general if you were comparing students who wanted to attend a new school or attended a school of choice to students who didn’t, that would be a problem. What we do in the paper to deal with that is we use these lotteries. We say, anyone who wants to attend a school, signs up for the lottery. Then, within the lottery, some students are randomly selected to have that opportunity. If you compare the students who wanted to go versus the students that wanted to go but weren’t selected, that is a pretty clean comparison because they would both in theory have the same level of motivation.

Q But couldn’t the students who applied for but were not accepted to the lottery program also affect truancy rate if, let’s say, they lost motivation due to the rejection?

A What we do to think about that is we compare the students who win the lottery to the students who lose the lottery, and we then compare both groups to students who don’t enter at all. The idea is the students who don’t enter at all don’t receive a positive or negative shock, and what you see is the students who lose the lottery and the students who don’t enter at all basically continue along the same trend, whereas the students who win the lottery tend to have lower truancy rates. That’s sort of the way we deal with that.

Q How do you think your study would fare in terms of repeatability and scalability?

A There have been other studies of these high-performing charter schools, especially in Boston and neighboring cities that have come up with results that are qualitatively similar to ours in terms of finding these large test score effects. I would say that the result is beginning to appear more frequently. There have also been other large-scale studies on the effect of school choice, like in New York City … , that have found modest but positive effects. I would say, in general, our test score findings are broadly consistent with current research.

Q In the paper you focused on truancy rate change after students were admitted to their choice school, but before they actually enrolled. What was the reasoning behind that?

A The idea is that students that get to attend their chosen school benefit in at least two ways. On the one hand, they may benefit if their new school is better than the school they might have attended, or if the school is a better match for them. That could be true for how they score on tests, or for how they behave in the classroom if the pedagogical style is better suited to them. At the same time, students may benefit if they are more motivated and bring more to the table themselves when they have the opportunity to attend a school that they want to attend. Now, the problem is that generally those two things take place at the same time, so you are becoming more motivated, but you are also attending a school that may be a better match for you. The insight that we had is that there is a brief period of time when students haven’t been directly exposed to this new teaching that happens at their chosen school, but may already have accrued some of the motivational benefits just by knowing they have the opportunity to go in the future.

Q That kind of reminds me of college admissions.

A Yeah, right? College admissions might be the opposite though because once you find out you got in, it’s over [laughs].

Q Are you continuing this research?

A One project I’m currently involved with is a project I am doing with one of the co-authors of this paper, Chris Neilson, about school construction. New Haven has one of the biggest per capita school construction projects in the country and it’s been sort of a high priority of the mayor and the school administration for about 20 years now. They’ve rebuilt nearly every school in the city. If you walk around New Haven you’ll notice that a lot of these elementary schools are really beautiful. [Cooperative Arts and Humanities High School] downtown was rebuilt under this project. [Worthington] Hooker School at East Rock was rebuilt as well. It’s about a $1.5 billion project. Chris and I worked with the New Haven district to evaluate that project and tried to understand what impact rebuilding the schools had on the students in terms of scores and also what the impact was on neighborhoods and home prices around the schools. [We found] that these schools had relatively large and sustained effects on student performance and the neighborhoods that surround the schools had increases in home prices. If they build a new school in your school zone, the value of the surrounding homes will tend to go up by a modest to large amount, I would say. This suggests that people value these projects because people are willing to pay more for a house that has default access to the newly constructed schools.

Q What about your upcoming projects?

A We’re doing a big project in Chile right now where we’re trying to run a large informational experiment with the goal of seeing how having better information about the costs and benefits of different college degree programs affect students’ choices about where to attend college. Chile is facing many of the similar issues that we are facing here in the sense that they have a partially privatized higher education system together with public loans. [This means that] choices that students make about where to go to college have consequences as far as student loan default, [which can pose] big costs to the government. In some ways it is a more extreme situation than we have here.

- American Federation for Children | Alliance for School Choice, MSG

Despite Inconclusive Audit Results, Impact of School Choice Programs Remains Strong

Despite a state audit of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) released this week that could not conclude how the voucher schools impacted state scores for the program’s participants—in part due to a recent change in state testing requirements—overwhelming evidence still shows strong benefits from participating in voucher programs.

The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program requires that all students in grades 4, 8, and 10 who participate in the program take a nationally normed standardized test. The School Choice Demonstration Project, which conducts a gold-standard, independent evaluation of the program, found earlier this year that students participating in the Milwaukee voucher program show gains in academic achievement and are more likely to graduate from high school and enroll and subsist in college.

The independent evaluation's results showed that vouchers students were more than 7 percentage points more likely to graduate from high school than students in Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS).  Studies also show that a majority of parents with children in the program would rate their child’s voucher school with an “A,” compared to only 34 percent of MPS parents.  In particular, “MPCP parents are most satisfied with what is taught in school, school safety, and the amount their child has learned.”

Dr. Patrick Wolf, the principal investigator of the School Choice Demonstration Project and lead researcher on the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, said the following about the Legislative Audit Bureau’s inconclusive results:

"We pointed out, ourselves, that it was difficult to untangle the academic gains from the Choice Program from any boost they might have received by switching to a high stakes test. Still, the evidence is clear that participants in the Choice Program graduated from high school, enrolled in four-year colleges, and persisted in college at significantly higher rates than did comparable MPS students. This finding of higher educational attainment in the Choice Program, which is ignored in the Audit Bureau report, is important because higher levels of attainment are closely associated with a host of better life outcomes for individuals and society. The fact that private school choice programs boost educational attainment has been established by every study that has examined that question, in the District of Columbia, New York City, and Milwaukee."

- American Federation for Children | Alliance for School Choice, MSG

A Lone Star Leap Towards School Choice

On Friday, the Texas State Senate Education Committee held a hearing on bringing a school voucher program to the Lone Star State.  Legislators have been considering enacting prischool choice legislation, with nearly successful campaigns in 2007 and just last year.  While advocates already testified on the merits of school choice, here’s another list on why Texas should enact a statewide, accountable private school voucher program.

Reasons Texas Should Enact Private School Choice

1. Only 29 percent of 4^th graders and 27 percent of Texas 8^th graders are proficient in reading.  In math, 39 percent of 4^th graders and 40 percent of 8^th graders are proficient.

2. Nearly half—48.8 percent—of Texas students qualify for the federal free and reduced-price lunch program.  That’s more than the national average.

3. According to the U.S. Department of Education, Texas only graduates three-fourths of its high-school students. 

4. Graduation rates of school choice programs are high.  The D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program boasts a graduation rate of 91 percent—more than 30 percentage points higher than students in D.C. Public Schools.  The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program demonstrated graduation rates at more than 7 percentage points higher than students attending the Milwaukee Public Schools.  And a recent study of a New York City voucher program found that African American recipients are 24 percent more likely to enroll in college as a result of participating in the voucher program.

5. Parents of students who participate in private school choice programs are overwhelmingly satisfied with their child’s academic program.  Consecutive surveys in Louisiana show parental satisfaction of the program above 93 percent.  Surveys in Washington, D.C., Milwaukee, Florida, and Ohio have all shown high parental satisfaction rates and feedback.

6. School choice fosters competition: A study of the Florida Scholarship Tax Credit found that the passage of the program led to standardized test score gains in the public schools most likely to lose students to private schools.

7. But most important of all, parents know best.  Families have the right to escape failing schools and send their children to a school that will provide a quality education.  No one is better suited to see that their children thrive than parents.

We’ll be keeping an eye on the happenings in Texas as legislators work to expand charter schools and bring private school choice to Texas families. And for more research into the benefits of school choice, visit our research page here.

- American Federation for Children | Alliance for School Choice, MSG

A Tale of One City, Two Events

It might be August recess for Capitol Hill, but the rest of Washington, D.C. is abuzz with policy analysis.  And today’s topic is school choice.

The Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution and the Harvard Kennedy School on Program and Education Policy and Governance today released a study that shows that African American participants in a private school choice program were 24 percent more likely to enroll in college as a result of receiving a voucher.

This groundbreaking study, which used a randomized experiment to measure the impact of vouchers on college enrollment—joins a plethora of gold-standard research that has already demonstrated high graduation and parental satisfaction rates among private school choice participants.

“The Effects of School Vouchers on College Enrollment: Experimental Evidence from New York City,” which tracked participating students in New York City over a nearly 15-year period, was conducted by Matthew M. Chingos of Brookings and Paul Peterson, a longtime leading researcher on school choice programs and speaker at the AFC National Policy Summit held earlier this year.

Also among the findings:

• African American enrollment rates in selective colleges more than doubled among voucher students

• The rate of enrollment in full-time colleges increased by 31 percent

The data is consistent with results of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, which found that voucher students graduate at a rate of 91 percent—more than 30 percentage points higher than students who did not participate in the program.  And according to the program’s administrator, in the 2009 and 2010 school years, 94 percent of 12^th graders participating in the program graduated from high school—and 89 percent of OSP graduates went on to enroll in a two- or four-year college or university.

D.C. and New York aren’t the only places where vouchers have been shown to be a success.  Similar students demonstrating increased achievement and parental satisfaction rates have been conducted in Milwaukee, Florida, and Louisiana.

Kevin P. Chavous on Why Democrats Must Support School Choice

Last month on the Washington Post’s “The Answer Sheet” Blog, guest blogger Jeff Bryant argued why Democrats should not support any form of educational options.  Check out the response from AFC Senior Advisor Kevin P. Chavous, a former D.C. Councilman and a lifelong Democrat, on why Democrats must put partisan politics aside and support school choice:

Jeff Bryant’s July 18 piece on Valerie Strauss’ “The Answer Sheet” blog lets blind partisanship get in the way of an accurate characterization of school choice programs across the country.  As a Democrat, I full-heartedly support school choice in every form—from strong traditional public schools to charter schools to voucher programs—because these options shift our focus from an antiquated, overly-bureaucratized one-size-fits-all system that is sadly failing millions of disadvantaged children to those who know their children best—parents. Your failure to think critically is apparent in your change-averse ideology that prizes the status quo over proven measures that will help kids.

In a political climate where bipartisanship is growing increasingly rare, school choice breaks the mold, having earned the backing of Republicans and Democrats in places like Louisiana, Florida, Wisconsin, Georgia, Ohio, and right here in the nation’s capital. The reason, which Mr. Bryant fails to acknowledge, is simple: for many lawmakers, the future of our country’s next generation is far more important that scoring political points.

The assumption that poor families are misinformed is simply untrue, and it is that notion—one emphasizing system-wide decision-making over the best judgment of parents—that accounts for a great deal of the achievement gap that plagues our country’s educational performance.  It’s why when we put power pack into the hands of parents, as was done here in D.C., voucher students graduate at a rate of 91 percent—more than 30 percentage points higher than students in D.C. Public Schools.  And an evaluation of the Milwaukee voucher program also found a higher graduation rates and a trend that participating students were more likely to enroll and continue in four-year universities than their public school counterparts.

It’s why when the opportunity for choice arises, parents respond in droves. More than 17,000 students are on waiting lists for public charter schools here in D.C. and more than 10,000 low-income families have applied for the voucher program since it was created in 2004.

So yes, Mr. Bryant, I am a Democrat who proudly favors school choice, and there is nothing meek about my support. After all, I’m on the side of the parents, and it’s they—not you—who really know what’s best for their kids.

—Kevin

- American Federation for Children | Alliance for School Choice, MSG

Rock Solid Ideas for the Granite State

Presidential hopefuls aren't the only folks making noise in New Hampshire this week: school choice supporters are having their voices heard, too. In fact, the New Hampshire General Court has established a committee to study how school choice—vouchers and tax credits—can help students access a quality education.

New Hampshire spends a whopping $11,700 for every student to attend public school in the state, with dismal results: only 39 percent of 8th graders are proficient in math and 43 percent are proficient in reading.

Here’s what leaders in Concord should consider:

Twelve states and the District of Columbia currently operate school choice programs giving more than 190,811 students access to high-quality private schools.  With more than 20 programs spanning the nation, low-income children, special needs children, foster care children, and students attending persistently failing schools have the chance to succeed.

• School voucher programs allow disadvantaged children to receive scholarships to attend the schools of their parents’ choice. In voucher programs, education dollars follow the student. With 20.5 percent of New Hampshire students qualifying for free or reduced lunch, a means-tested voucher program is a great option for the Granite State.

• Scholarship tax credit programs allow businesses and individuals to donate to scholarship-granting organizations that help children attend quality schools. Tax credit programs have helped more than 123,500 students across the nation receive scholarships.

The New Hampshire Committee on school choice is opening the door to school choice in the state.  New Hampshire elected officials need only to look around at the programs across the country for effective, highly-accountable programs that help thousands of children access a great education.

- American Federation for Children | Alliance for School Choice, MSG